Kids These Days

When it comes to their kids, parents struggle to strike that balance between providing a better life than what they themselves had v/s spoiling the kids rotten. But the next time we feel some other parent over-did the indulgence, maybe we should remember what Alex Balk says:

“For all the eye-rolling we do when we consider how children of a certain class are spoiled these days…it’s probably not a terrible thing to do to take a step back and examine where this exasperation comes from: Are we envious? Angry at ourselves for wishing we were handled so delicately during our own youth?”

Every generation has a gadget/device that causes parents to fret as to how it is ruining their kids. First TV, then cable TV, and now smartphones. The other day, my 4 year old put the phone casing to her ear, and said, “This is my smartphone”. Smartphone, not phone. Because she’s never seen a non-smartphone! Balk again nails what worries parents about smartphones:

“They speak to a larger concern that our surfeit of virtual opportunity and diversion will drain our youth of the greatest incentive for self-improvement there is: the desire to get away from parents and the general boredom of typical teenage subsistence. What do you do when you don’t have “there’s nothing to do” as an animating principle? What is life like when ennui and the angst of repeating the same eventless existence every day aren’t all that’s available? Without those things, what will happen to our kids?”

At pre-school and lower classes, kids get stars and smileys because they can’t yet read words and so “Good” or “Excellent” would be lost on them. Is that turning out to be a preparation for the “post-literacy world” that we seem to be headed towards? After all, the chat apps on the phone offer more and more emoticons:

“Pretty soon all written communication, even idiot acronyms whose ambiguities are only amplified by the lack of tonal clarity textual conversation provides, will be superseded by those stupid smiley faces so popular with the kids.”

In fact, there are so many of these smiley faces (aka emoji), there are even sites listing and explaining them for the emoji ignorant!

If all this provokes a reaction from parents, it just means we are old. After all, for today’s kids, as John Gruber says:

“Phone really just means “pocket-sized computer”, because they just presume the use of a touch screen and wireless networking.”

Amen to that: my 4 year old is certainly evidence of that.